The operations of the PTO are currently under severe strain and are failing to give a standard of client service that any of the stakeholders (including the management and staff of the Agency) regard as being of fully acceptable quality. The PTO estimate they are facing steeply rising workloads in the Protection and Receivership areas, although precise figures and the staffing consequential are not available.
Resources are severely limited, largely because of a funding regime which requires the PTO to be entirely self-financing from surpluses on Court Funds payments (which pay for the Court Funds Office) and fees paid by those Trust, Protection and Receivership clients who can afford them (which cover the rest of the Agency's costs). This has the practical effect of requiring fee-paying clients, often themselves of modest means, to subsidise others who are considered to be unable to afford to pay anything but who, like them, have no choice but to come within the Agency's sphere of responsibility. The PTO have drawn attention to this difficult situation more than once in the past but, despite recognition of the problems by LCD, the status quo has always been maintained; the last occasion the PTO formally raised this issue was in 1997.
The PTO's fee-charging system for Trust, Protection and Receivership work is not sufficiently developed to allow it to act as a mechanism for helping the Agency. It is not transparent and does not reflect levels of activity. It generates considerable dissatisfaction from those clients required to pay inflated fees and punitively high Trust and fund management termination charges and yet it does not discourage some people from opting to use the PTO as a cheaper alternative to solicitors or accountants. Some welcome simplification to the fee system has been achieved by the PTO within the last few weeks but a high level of cross- subsidy between clients remains and the system is still so complicated that it generates a lot of administrative work. It also hampers the internal financial regime of the Agency: weakness in fee calculation, collection and recording has been one of the key reasons why the PTO has been unable to produce its own accounts on an accruals basis to auditable standards.
A final major source of administrative pressure has been the fact that at Board level the PTO has been operating without a Corporate Services Director since April 1998 and an Assistant Public Trustee for most of the period between January 1998 and September 1999.
All these and other accumulative operational demands have meant that the senior management of the PTO has lacked the capacity:-
to take full advantage of the freedoms and flexibilities that Agency status can bring;
to consider the scope for blending its four disparate functions so as to maximise efficiency and improvements in its services through economies of scale or strategic business development;
to devise any strategic initiatives for partnerships with other organisations;
do more than react to some of the main recommendations of the 1994 and 1999 NAO and PAC Reports;
properly contribute to and prepare for the LCD's Consultation Paper "Who Decides?: Making Decisions on Behalf of Mentally Incapacitated Adults"; or
tackle client service issues in line with the ‘Modernising Government' White Paper.
Despite all this the PTO has managed to reduce the cross-subsidy between users of its Trust, Protection and Receivership work to 32%, (reducing its own available resources in the process however) and achieve Investors in People accreditation. It has not made any use of the Private Finance Initiative and has therefore had comparatively little to invest in Information Technology or office accommodation: the deficiencies in these two crucial areas are so severe that they have had an adverse effect on performance and staff morale.
The original targets, objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) of the new PTO Agency were, almost inevitably, drawn up on the best available information but without any practical testing. Once the new organisation had been operating for a year, the inappropriateness of some of the KPIs and the incorrect values of others became apparent to its managers and staff. However, in order for the PTO to attempt to convince LCD HQ and Ministers that significant changes were needed, demonstrably sound, comprehensive and reliable management information systems were required: but, as the Comptroller and Auditor General's reports have highlighted, these do not exist consistently throughout the Agency.
Some modifications to KPIs on an ad hoc basis have been made but the results have not balanced and directed the business more effectively. Moreover, they make a clear audit trail of performance against KPIs over the last five years impossible to follow and they have not always been introduced with the full involvement of all relevant parties eg LCD HQ, Internal Assurance Division or the NAO. The KPIs measuring the PTO's investment performance were soon not viewed as credible and appropriate by either PTO management or members of the Lord Chancellor's Honorary Investment Advisory Committee, although practical alternatives were not devised. A change implemented for 1998/99 is subject to current review in the light of criticism in the latest PAC Report. The aggregated unit cost KPI is so broad as to be almost meaningless given the vastly differing nature of the units of work being measured across the Agency's four functions.
In the absence of supporting systems and standardised monitoring, the management information of the PTO is too reliant on clerical records that cannot guarantee consistency or completeness. Many staff and first line managers complained during this Review about the heavy administrative burden of keeping records that to them had no obvious purpose. It is not surprising that senior managers in the PTO were often hesitant in this Review about committing themselves on statistics covering workload, clearances, performance and projections; nor that basic information or data might be only obtainable after special exercises and then subject to subsequent amendment. This is a factor that weakens the reliance that can be placed on some of the PTO's reported performances against its KPIs.
Understandably in view of the foregoing, PTO staff and managers have seen little benefit from Agency status; nor have they seen much change in the way the 4 component parts of the organisation are run. The intense and negative pressure caused by trying to achieve KPIs that do not drive the operations in a constructive way is the only aspect of Agency status that was universally and immediately identified by staff during discussions about this Review, although in many areas a clearer commitment to client service was appreciated and praised accordingly.
A particular achievement has been the PTO's success in reaching Investors in People accreditation after much hard work over a three-year period. In view of all the other difficulties the Agency has had to contend with, this must not be underrated. But staff training and the development of enhanced client service and business improvements are all areas which have had to bear the brunt of limited resources and the overriding need to tackle whichever element of operational performance was under the greatest strain at any given time. Morale in the PTO is inevitably patchy and there is a comparatively high sick absence rate. PTO staff average 13 ½ days sick leave per person each year, compared to the Court Service's 11 days, LCD HQ's 9 and the Land Registry's 8 ½ days.
There has been comparatively little formalised contact between the PTO and LCD HQ or Ministers, notwithstanding the considerable degree of autonomy that is due to an Agency. Without established, dedicated policy links, mechanisms for exchanging best practice or considering difficulties in a co-operative way and monitoring that extends much beyond collating Agency performance reports in LCD HQ, the PTO has had to operate pretty independently and to the best of its ability. It has given a high priority to discharging the directions of the Court of Protection, but until the last year or so there was no effective forum for the Agency and the Court to discuss the practical effects of the Court's polices or to consider how these might be modified in the light of operational experience and pressures. The benefits of such a constructive liaison are now beginning to emerge, but will be tested by the fact that some improvements in PTO performance commended by the PAC and agreed with the Court cannot easily be delivered in the view of PTO senior management concerned.
Beneficial changes are now clearly in the pipeline to the PTO's liaison with LCD HQ and indeed between LCD HQ and all its Agencies and linked Departments. The PTO should thus be able to play a more effective part in providing Ministers with operational policy advice, feedback and suggestions. Plans for mechanisms to provide more mutual support and exchange of best practice across the whole of LCD are particularly welcome developments. The PTO's inability to produce auditable accounts and a valid fee structure might well have been overcome if successes within those same areas by the Court Service, the Public Record Office and the Land Registry had been tapped for expertise; and proactive involvement in the production of the PTO's Business Plans and Annual Reports and Accounts would almost certainly have helped LCD HQ identify at an earlier stage the difficulties the Agency was struggling with. It is recommended that LCD complete their considerations of Agency monitoring and corporate liaison as a matter of urgency and build on the clear improvements already in hand.